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images!
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Over the past few nights, I've slowly plugged away at the 400 e-mail
messages that have accumulated over the past month. I'd already
deleted most of the spam, so this mail was mostly related to wrestling
and mailing lists to which I subscribe. This morning I sent out about
200 e-mails to the people that were awaiting responses. So, I'm
finally back up to date and my response time should now return to the
usual day or two tops.
I will be updating the tape lists on the weekend, I hope. I already
have a bunch of new tape data inputted, but I want to add a few more
to the mix before putting an update on the web. I'll also be reworking
the presentation of the data slightly. There are several legally blind
users that use text web browsers to read these pages and I've just
learned that HTML tables cause them some grief. There are ways to work
around this so that the layout looks cool for everybody. At some point
in the future, I'd really like to add a forms page that allows
searches of the data, but that's a way off.
Please send me feedback on the comparison between WithAuthority and
The Wrestling Channel, on the prospect of more pictures, etc. I've
received a lot of e-mail already, but I want to make sure to make any
decisions in the future with the readers of these pages taken into
account.
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Picture/Animation of the Week
Although I had various requests to produce pictures of certain
wrestlers, I received the most requests for animations with 160x120
frame size and loads of frames. With that in mind, and because of the
controversy of the whole situation meaning that we'll remember this
moment for a long time, here's a relatively huge animated gif of the
final sequence in the Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels match from
Survivor Series. It's 160x120 with 130 frames at 100 colours to
conserve space, coming in at roughly 2Mb. Please give me some feedback
on whether I've crossed the size line. Last week's Sable animated gif
led to a lot of feedback suggesting longer animations were okay.
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- Suppose you are the owner of one of the two prime pro-wrestling
companies in North America. Your top champion has disagreed with the
company direction for a long time and has seemingly continually been
at odds with your other top performer. You don't feel that the flavour
of your product can change; you've given things a rougher and seedier
edge to separate yourself from your opposition. House show business
has been great. At your behest -- you want to free up the money spent
on this guy -- your top champion exercises an option in his contract
so that he can leave for the opposition. A heated "war" has been waged
in the industry and your company has repeatedly come out on the losing
side, to the point that the areas which you once dominated -- talent
roster, ratings, buy rates -- are now dominated by that very same
opposition. Losing your top champ is going to hurt like hell, and
there's no positive way to spin it, but it is a business decision that
you've made. He's leaving, and the bad part is that the opposition can
announce his pending arrival in a week, the day after a key PPV title
defence. Perhaps stupidly, you've left the title on him until this
last minute. Unfortunately, the PPV title defence is against the one
wrestler to whom your champ does not want to drop the title, the other
top performer in your company. The industry has "evolved," perhaps in
part thanks to the current heated competition, so that wrestlers with
immense fan appeal are increasingly able to call a lot of their own
shots: several key figures in the opposition have directly and
negatively affected the booker's carefully laid-out plans, and
wrestlers in your own company, including the one guy to whom your
champ won't lose, have also played games to control their image and
manage their losses. To top it off, your champ has a clause in his
contract guaranteeing him creative control over his finishes, so you
can't say that he's being an unreasonable primadonna by exercising
that clause. The day approaches, the obvious title change isn't agreed
to by the champ, although a different title change after the
announcement by the opposition could likely be arranged. It's a hot
match-up between the best workers in your company; you expect a lot of
fans to buy the show. What do you do?
That's the story of the WWF Survivor Series this past Sunday. Here's a
quick rundown on the undercard, which both for wrestling content and
newsworthiness was completely inconsequential:
* Billy Gunn & Roaddog Jesse James & Godwinns beat Headbangers &
Blackjacks: The first in a line of bad undercard matches. Only
Gunn has potential. Gunn & Roaddog survived. A sad opener.
* Truth Commission beat DOA: Interrogator was the sole survivor. A
really bad match, since nobody involved can acutally work.
Interrogator is so bad that pushing him this hard was
embarrassing. The Truth Commission's manager, The Jackal, doesn't
work well, IMO.
* Davey Boy Smith & Jim Neidhart & Doug Furnas & Phil LaFon beat
Vader & Goldust & Marc Mero & Steve Blackman: This was billed as
Team Canada against Team USA. The first match with a few good
workers, but the face side is severely hindered, since Goldust is
turning and had an injured wrist, Mero also seems to be a
pseudo-heel and doesn't do anywhere near as much in the ring as he
used to, and Blackman can't do much of anything. So, it was
Vader's match to carry for his side. He did as a good a job as can
be expected, but the match was still poor. Smith survived.
* Kane beat Mankind: Mankind tried. He did a lot of his patented
bumps and some variations. He did his half. Kane is Glen
Jacobs...he is not good. No sane person would consider this a good
match. That said, Kane is going to get over despite the stupidity
of it all. They wrestled under red lights, which was more than a
little annoying. The pyrotechnic devices are strapped to the ring
posts for the whole show, but when Kane gestures and they go off,
the commentators pretend he has supernatural powers. It's worse
than being fooled by fake Stings time and time again.
* Ken Shamrock & Ahmed Johnson & LOD vs. NOD: Five useless matches
in a row at this point. Shamrock has learned a lot in a short
time. D.Lo Brown was the second best wrestler in the match, which
is a compliment to him and a heavy criticism of the rest.
* Steve Austin beat Owen Hart to win the IC Title: Both guys are
coming back from injuries, Austin's admittedly more brutal. The
match was depressingly short and uneventful. Austin is hot, but if
he has a few more matches like this, it will kill him. At this
point, I was pretty depressed. Austin looks to be reduced to a
shadow of his former self. The undercard was the poorest of any
show in recent memory. It really needed a lightheavyweight
elimination match, or a Mexican minis elimination match, or the
once-rumoured Japanese women's elimination match. Instead, we were
hammered into the ground with non-stop poor wrestling.
After all of this, only Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels remained, the
departing champ against the one person to whom he won't drop the belt.
For the entire show, Vince McMahon was unseen, presumably trying to
come up with a booking arrangement that was agreeable to all parties.
It had long ago been decided that Hart was leaving, with the match
even being hyped as the last chance to see these two guys against each
other. So, remembering the first paragraph above, what do you do?
Vince chose the doublecross, the ambush, and some, unthinkingly, IMO,
will say he made the right call. The match unfolded weirdly. Hart &
Michaels brawled all over; it was really good stuff, crisp and with
intent, not careless and contrived at all. Vince McMahon came out to
convince the guys to get in the ring. Eventually that happened. They
had a reasonably good match, although it was not near the marathon
match at a past WrestleMania. Shawn Michaels spoke too loudly again
(as he had on RAW the previous week, in a match against Ken Shamrock
that seemed to be thrown together at the last second), clearly talking
to Bret Hart about his bleeding hand. Then came one of the few spots
that seemed to have been carefully booked. Referee Earl Hebner took a
bump along with both wrestlers. Shawn Michaels recovered first and
slapped the Sharpshooter on Hart. This spot has been done in other
recent Hart matches, so surely Hart wouldn't balk at the suggestion.
In fact, it seems likely that the match booking would follow the
routine of having Hart escape from his own finisher and Michaels also
not fall victim to his own finisher; you know the routine: these guys
know each other so well that they do each other's moves but they each
escape from their own moves. Maybe a non-finish was promised to Hart
with a make-up loss planned the next night on RAW against one of the
list of opponents to whom Hart was willing to drop the strap. Anyhow,
as Michaels barely gets in position for the Sharpshooter, referee
Hebner immediately - before Hart can have a chance to react - calls
for the bell as if Hart submitted, when every fan watching knows that
it was not the case. Michaels releases the hold, Bret scissors
Michaels' leg for a second with a look of total disbelief on his face
before letting Michaels free, Bret yells at McMahon and spits on him,
Michaels looks damn upset as he grabs the title and gets escorted
away, the referee races from the ring as soon as he signals for the
bell, and they fade to black less than a minute after the doublecross.
There is much speculation that Michaels was in on the ambush of Hart.
Because of the ending, there is a strong curiousity factor attached to
watching this match, but the match rating has to take a large hit over
it, making this one of the worst PPVs of the year from a match quality
standpoint. I gave the show a thumbs down.
At the end of the night, then, Michaels has the belt, Hart has lost to
him in his own hold, and all is well, right? Wrong. Earlier, I
suggested that Vince made the wrong call and I stand by that. Since
Bret had the creative control clause in his contract, you can't even
say that Vince was justified in doing what he did: within a certain
legal framework, employers should be able to tell employees what to
do, unless they give those employees a contract with creative control.
Ignoring that issue completely, a heavy-handed approach has
repercussions that can often make it the wrong move. Consider:
* With a large audience watching, Vince completely devalued the
world title. Every single fan watching has to think that Bret Hart
was screwed out of the title. In a way, it's worse than if Bret
was allowed to forfeit the title and walk away from the company.
* Wrestler morale plummetted to a new low. It's standard business
sense to know that if a stellar employee is treated like refuse,
all of the other employees are going to get depressed over it. By
refusing to lose to Michaels, Bret may have lost his "stellar"
standing, you say, but Michaels is hardly the king of popularity
in the company, with his record of egotism unmmatched. As we saw
the next night on RAW, many wrestlers (Owen, Neidhart, Bulldog,
LOD, Windham, Vega, LOD, Mankind) boycotted the show in response.
* Hart & WCW can now refer to the botched doublecross in interviews.
Already on Monday Nitro, they talked about Hart not being a
quitter, etc. Hart may have been leaving the WWF in displeasure
anyhow, but now he leaves an enemy.
* Despite deserving all the praise in the world as a worker, Shawn
Michaels has constantly shown himself to be a primadonna when it
comes to being a company man. Sure, Bret showed a little of that
on this night, but is the WWF really better off now? This runs a
little into second-guessing Vince for wanting to get rid of Bret.
* Who is going to believe a "creative control" clause in a contract
offer from the WWF in the future?
What were the alternatives? It sure seems like the title had to leave
Bret this night. So, the obvious choice is to go the "verbal contract"
route. Have Bret & Shawn deliver a stellar match that goes to a time
limit draw or a no contest or some other sort, without ripping off the
fans from a great match. Then have Wrestler X appear somehow, perhaps
to stop a post-match brawl between Shawn & Bret. Bret could grab the
microphone and say he is sick of people getting involved in his
business when they don't have any place in it, etc., and, despite
being exhausted, he could offer Wrestler X a shot at the belt right
then. Bingo, he drops the strap however decisively we can convince him
to do it. He leaves with the excuse that he had already worked a
match. The new champ gets over for beating Bret decisively. We've got
a title change clip that could open RAW and that could be replayed
whenever the war demands Bret be embarrassed. Bret reportedly agreed
to drop the belt to Ken Shamrock, Jeff Jarrett, Hunter Hearst
Helmsley, etc., so surely there was somebody who they could have
agreed on for that night. Instead, Bret leaves for WCW in a stronger
position than everything he leaves behind, IMO. There are reports that
Bret refused to lose the title on this show, period, a stand that is
perfectly within his contractual rights. Anybody that dumps on Bret
for not giving the WWF an easy out, which he contractually does no
have to give them, after the promotion asked him to leave, is knocking
on the wrong door.
- Connected to the Bret Hart story, several Canadian papers ran
stories about his departure before Sunday. That has been
well-documented on the net. However, some sources also reported that
Owen Hart planned to follow Bret as soon as possible. I don't know the
details of Owen's WWF contract, so I have no clue when he could leave.
It's worth mentioning, since with Bret leaving and Austin likely never
being the same, Owen & Davey Boy Smith are among the top five workers
in the promotion now, if they weren't before. Statements that Owen is
planning to leave and speculation that Smith will also follow are
reasonably crippling suggestions.
RAW this past Monday was a weird show. Intrigue was high, since the
PPV the night before left the WWF Title weak and the upper echelon of
the promotion in tatters. Boycotts were planned and, sure enough,
numerous wrestlers refused to appear. Jim Ross seemed to be
sympathetic towards Hart, perhaps because the company had to present
that face to win back the boycotters.
Shawn Michaels tried to sound convincing when he said he beat Bret
Hart and chased him out of the WWF, but I can't imagine anybody over
10 who saw the PPV bought the line. Indeed, the crowd was filled with
signs that suggested that the fans were less than enamoured with a
decision to get rid of Bret. And the fans even chanted his name during
the interview, which really seemed to tick Shawn off. Marc Mero &
Ahmed Johnson had a bad match which ended with Mero getting DQed for
using a low blow; afterwards, Mero tried to use his Diamond Cutter
style finish, but it didn't work. Taka Michinoku defeated Devon Storm
in the second best match of the weekend wrestling run. Taka is great,
but couldn't carry Storm to a cohesive match, so the bout came off
like a bunch of spots slapped together. The only other interesting
parts: Blackjack Justin Bradshaw started to get pushed as a bunkhouse
fighter, although he lost in a handicap match against Jesse James &
Billy Gunn (talk continues that Bradshaw will be repackaged); Steve
Blackman returned; Butterbean got involved with Marc Mero, with Mero
teasing a boxing match between the two at some point down the road;
Ken Shamrock & Hunter Hearst Helmsley had a passable match that saw
Shawn Michaels interfere, with no finish announced as the show ended.
If Shamrock vs. Michaels and Mero vs. Butterbean doesn't excite you,
they also started building to Steve Austin vs. Rocky Maivia, Goldust
vs. Vader, and, of course, the Brian Christopher vs. Taka Michinoku
lightheavyweight final.
The lightheavyweight tournament standings are:
Quarter Finals Semi Finals Finals
Aguila
Aguila
Super Loco
Taka Michinoku?
Taka Michinoku
Taka Michinoku?
Devon Storm
Scott Taylor
Scott Taylor
Eric Shelley
Brian Christopher?
Brian Christopher
Brian Christopher?
Flash Flanagan
Nitro this past Monday was a pretty good show, easily delivering the
best wrestling action of the weekend with a great Rey Misterio Jr. vs.
Eddie Guerrero title match that saw Eddie regain the Cruiserwelt
strap. The show opened with the NWO walking out with Canadian flags,
announcing that Kevin Nash was now back, Nash coming out, and finally
saying that Bret Hart was coming to the NWO. They went on to sing "Oh
Canada!" to Bret, completely butchering the lyrics and the melody,
which surely should indicate that Hart will not go to the NWO. I took
it as a somewhat subtle angle that most American fans would miss,
since they don't know the tune of the Canadian anthem. Steve Regal &
Dave Taylor were given a win over Harlem Heat. They don't have any
credibility (yet?), but they are a great team. Disco Inferno began his
next life as a loser who uses the Stone Cold Stunner, since WCW is mad
that WWF midcarder Marc Mero is using Diamond Dallas Page's finishing
move, however slightly modified. The other interesting moments saw
Yuji Nagata beat Alex Wright; Chris Benoit & Perry Saturn go to a no
contest when everybody got involved, including the godawful Van Hammer
with a new look; the aforementioned match of the weekend with Eddie
Guerrero regaining the Cruiserweight belt and staring down Dean
Malenko; Diamond Dallas Page going to a DQ with Curt Hennig; and Lex
Luger & Ric Flair delivering a surprisingly passable match (after all
of Luger's recent dogs) with no finish. The show closed as Sting was
laid out by the NWO.
- New Japan disbanded the J Crown last week, returning the various
belts to their original promotions. Only the IWGP Jr. Title remains.
- WCW has World War III on 11/23/97. Tentative line-up has:
* Three-ring, sixty-man battle royal, with the winner earning a WCW
Title shot at SuperBrawl in February
* Ric Flair vs. Curt Hennig for the US Title in a no DQ match
* Steve McMichael vs. Bill Goldberg
* Rey Misterio Jr. vs. Eddie Guerrero for the Cruiserweight Title
* Yuji Nagata vs. El Ultimo Dragon
- The WWF has Degeneration X In Your House on 12/07/97. Tentative
line-up has:
* Shawn Michaels vs. Ken Shamrock for the WWF Title
* Vader vs. Goldust
* Marc Mero vs. Butterbean
* Sgt. Slaughter vs. Hunter Hearst Helmsley
* Brian Christopher vs. Taka Michinoku for the lightheavyweight
title in the tournament final
- WCW has Starrcade on 12/28/97. Tentative line-up has:
* Sting vs. Hulk Hogan for the WCW Title
- - RAW 11/10 with a 4.4 rating against a 3.4 rating.
The detailed ratings are a click away.
- The PPV buy rates of the past six months (year or so) show that the
WWF has an average buy rate of 0.59 (0.52) and average gross of
$1.51-million ($1.32-million), while WCW has an average buy rate of
0.69 (0.67) and average gross of $2.12-million ($2.02-million).
The details as they stand are available.
- Videos: I have posted something about the availability of videos. If
you missed it, I'll send it to you in e-mail upon request.
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Thanks to: Masaki Aso.
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